Monday, June 30, 2014
Missing episodes
According to Minister for Social Services Kevin Andrews, mental illness is “episodic”, rather than permanent – and so it makes sense for people
to work during the “good” times, at least. Why set the default for the “bad” times; i.e.
pay the DSP in both sickness and in health? Yes, but is this quite a glass half
full/empty situation?
To answer this, let’s look forward at what happens when the
next mental illness “episode” occurs during a work spell. Quite possibly, the person will be unable to
continue working. Even if the ill person
wants to continue working, the employer will likely want them stood down (to
use a vague term), for the duration of the episode, at least.
And there’s the rub. Generally speaking, it is illegal to sack, or
otherwise penalise an employee on the grounds of ill-health. So the employer will dread the prospect of a
mental-illness prone employee becoming unwell – they will then either have to be
paid for not working, or surreptitiously cut adrift, in a usually prolonged
process which just scrapes in on the side of what is legal.
The former means that the insurance aspect of the DSP is
outsourced to the employer. Which is a
win for taxpayers, I guess, but a huge disincentive for employing anyone with a
mental illness – the employer knows that they may be writing a blank cheque, that
is, underwriting the employee’s wages during their episodes of illness.
The latter means that the employer gets to shift – eventually
– financial liability for the person’s support back to the state (after all the
paperwork has been done, and the waiting periods served, of course). The biggest cost here, however, will be borne
by the person with the mental illness – having lost their job on vague and/or
technical grounds (but well knowing why they really lost it), the “episode” will almost certainly be deeper and
longer for this experience. That is, the
end of the “health” phase – which is generally foreseeable as, for all concerned,
a nasty HR process – adds greatly to the accumulation of “sickness”. Put another way, if the person had never got
that job, their total “sickness” most likely would have been less.
